Religion and Anthropology

Author(s): S. F. MacLennan
Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 2, No. 6 (Nov., 1922), pp. 600-615
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 RELIGION AND ANTHROPOLOGY
S. F. MAcLENNAN
OberlinCollege,Oberlin,Ohio

Thispaper
iswritten
fromthegenetic andtraces
viewpoint ofanthro-
thebearings
pologyandhistoryuponthescienceof religion.
Anthropology showsus that religionis an integralfunctionof the humansocial
order:thatit varieswiththeevolution ofthisorder:thatitsfinaltestmustconsist in
its humanservice(a) as reflecting
thefundamental, effectivevaluesof man'slifeand
(b) as also reflectingman'smorepermanent and intelligentattitudestowardhis
environment.
From primitive times to the present day, religion has exhibited two permanent
types. As these appear in savage life they are denominated animistic and naturistic:
as they are exhibited by our highest civilizations they are spoken of as monotheistic
and pantheistic. The one is distinctively human in temperament: the other is cosmic.
The future form of religion would appear to depend upon whether man masters
his environment and dedicates his powers to worthy social ends or whether man's
environment masters him and extinguishes creative impulse toward human uplift.

It is a matter of curiousinterest that, coincidentwith the

sharp decline in theological values during the past seventy-
five years, there should have been an increasinglysharp and
constant rise in religiousvalues.
It will scarcelybe doubtedthat the rise and developmentof
modernphilosophyand science,but more especiallythe growth
of historicaland comparativecriticism,has reducedthe prestige
of theology-ordinarily so called-to a very low if not, indeed,
to a vanishing point. The intelligent world of today cares
little, if anything, for the theologicalshibbolethsof our fathers.
And yet, to this same intelligent world of today, religionis an
object of abiding, vital interest. The question, indeed, con-
cernsno longerthe "reality" of religionbut ratherits definition,
its function, its range: the descriptionof its objects and pro-
cesses; in a word, its orientation in this new, modern, and
contemporary social order. Nowadays, one has as much
right, intellectually, to speak of religion as to speak of art,
or literature or science or philosophy. Serious conflict may
arisein any one of these fields,but to the intelligent,instructed
mind they all have "reality."
600

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 RELIGION AND ANTHROPOLOGY 6oi

The above-mentionedstatus of religion is the product of

many and diverseinquiries-a risingnew theologywhich keeps
more in touch with science and philosophy than the old; the
keen and ordered examinations of religious literatures by
exegete, historicalcritic and comparativereligionist; the work
of the nature sciences especiallyas concerns the problemsof
life and mind; the cultivation of the vast and remunerative
fields of the social order; the implicationsof a more natural
and evolutionaryethics; the pragmaticthrust of philosophical
insights, both negative and positive. These and many other
forces have co-operated to the result-the status of religion
as an objective and significantreality.
Of these numerousand varied forcesI shall trace the influ-
ence of but one-that of anthropology. We shall find, how-
ever, that its influenceis fundamentalboth in giving a sense of
reality to religionand in definingit.
Anthropologyis to the life of primitive man what history,
taken in the broadestsense of the term, is to the subsequent
periods of his development. History seeks to describe,accu-
rately, man's life, especiallyman's deeds, and, as far as may
be, the circumstanceswhich conditionedthose deeds and that
life. Similarly, anthropologyaims to reveal to our view the
life of man in all the facts and principlesof his culturefromits
most primitive to its most civilized state.
Now one of the most unquestionableas it is one of the most
significant results of anthropologicalscience is the fact that
religion is inseparablefrom human life and human society.
Nay, we may even go so far as to contend that anthropology
compels us to recognizenot merely that religionis inseparable
from the human process, but also that it is essential thereto.
No matter to what phase or stage of humanculturewe turn we
find religion,and, moreover,we find it everywhereclose-locked
with the deepest impulses and dearest interests of mankind.
Religionis not a late productof human speculation; nor is it a
superficialcircumstancein man's life; its currents are the

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602 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

underswelling tides of life; it infests human life universally.

But to recognize such things as these is to admit that religion
possesses objective quality. It can no longer be treated as a
subjective affair in the sense in which "subjectivity" is made
coincident with "unreality."
If, however, religion be accorded an objective status, if it
possesses real entity in this present hard-pan world of ours,
the question as to its nature, origin, and function becomes one
of absorbing interest, and anthropology finds it to be such.
One of the puzzling problems of the modern theologian has
been to obtain a satisfactory definition of religion. In earlier
days the difficulty was not so pressing inasmuch as the known
religious forms were much fewer and there was a more uniform
agreement in man's attitude toward them. On the other hand,
during the past century and a half the field of the world's reli-
gions has been canvassed with increasing zeal and effectiveness,
the result being that an awakening consciousness as to the mul-
tiplicity of religious forms has so obscured the apprehension of
their unity-if such there be-that definition has become well-
nigh an impossibility. Yet, of necessity, definitions there have
been, and with certain of these we are, all of us, familiar, e.g.:
" It is com-
"Religion is the true relation of the soul to God."
munion with God." "It is the belief in an ever living God."
"It is the apprehension of the infinite." " It is the mystical
union with God." "It is a feeling of absolute dependence
upon God." "It is the consciousness of our practical relation
to an invisible spiritual order." "Religion is the attempt to
express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect
of our being." "Religion might be identified with his [man's]
attitude, whatever it might be, toward what he felt to be the
primal truth." These definitions are sufficiently varied we
may, perhaps, be agreed, and they are equally true. Each de-
scribes a definite body of religious beliefs. In them religion
voices its virile presence through intellectual, emotional, or
volitional media. But none of them-or so it seems to me-

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 RELIGION AND ANTHROPOLOGY 603

meets the demands of definition as applied to the full body of

religious facts nor furnishes us with a tool adequate to the
proper cultivation and understanding of religion in its lowest
as truly as in its highest forms. As a matter of fact the above-
quoted definitions of religion are based upon highly developed
religious forms. They lack both the completeness and the
fundamental character that is necessary if we are both to under-
stand sympathetically other religions than our own and also to
grasp the principle by means of which religion may continuously
readjust itself to its ever changing environment and thus renew
the well-springs of its life.
With the desire, then, to put ourselves in contact with a
more dynamic conception of religion than is represented by the
definitions previously quoted and at the same time to clarify, to
some extent, my own thinking, I ask your attention to a brief
discussion of the work being done along these lines by certain of
our anthropologists, and more especially by Emile Durkheim in
his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. If our discussion
were taking a wider range we should be compelled to pay
tribute to the foundational work done by such men as Tylor;
Robertson Smith; J. G. Frazer; Spencer; Gillen; Rivers;
Marett; L6vy-Bruhl; Crawley; Ames; and by Miss Jane
Harrison, among others.
According to the analysis of Durkheim two fundamental
factors are to be found in religion. Religion concerns itself at
bottom with the sacred and with the divine: in other words, it
has to do with the sanctities and with the divinities of life,
however differently these matters have been envisaged by the
successive generations and races of men.
In this conception of religion, Durkheim, I believe, stands
upon solid ground. Whatever else religion may or may not
be, it feeds upon sanctities and lives only in the atmosphere of
the divinities. Eliminate all sense of the sacred in life and you
destroy religion: destroy the divinities and, whatever else may
remain, religion vanishes away. On the other hand does not

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604 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

religiondeepen and expand as our sense of the sacreddeepens

and expands? Does not religiongerminateand grow increas-
ingly with the senseof the divine? It may be objectedthat our
sense of the sacred and the divine is utterly subjective and
illusory. The contention in itself is a fair one and must be
met by the religionist. But it is not in point here. If true,
the objectionwould lead to the discardingof religionand with
that result--or with the reverse-we are not, logically, for the
momentconcerned. What is of importanceis to recognizethat
the experienceof the sanctities and the divinities of life consti-
tutes the essence of all religion. At its lowest observable
levels, in its highest forms, and in all the stages between,
religionlives and moves and has its being in the mediumof the
sacred and the divine.
Furthermore,these two factors in religion are everywhere
present. Sometimesone factor is predominantand sometimes
the other, but the presence of both is essential to the fact.
Anotherway of stating the same point is to say that, although
some religions are more explicitly human and some more
explicitly cosmic in type, all religions are essentially both
human and cosmic. This point becomesespeciallysuggestive
whenwe anticipatea laterresultandpoint out that "sanctities"
are essentially human, whereas "divinities" are essentially
cosmic.
In coincidence with the foregoing statement Durkheim
points out that elementaryforms of religiondivide themselves
into two contrasted types. To these he gives the names
animisticand naturistic. They agree in their common regard
forspiritualvalues,but they differ-and fundamentally-in that
the one finds its controlcenter in humanvalues and principles,
whereascosmicprinciplesand cosmicsignificanceconstitutethe
control center of the other.
By animisticreligionsDurkheimunderstandsthose in which
the religiousobject (orobjects)are thought of as being akin,in
nature, to the human subject. Human characteristicsand

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 RELIGIONAND ANTHROPOLOGY 605

human ways are the ways and characteristicsof the spirits,

of whateverorderthey may be. True, every spirit is, in fact,
a part of nature, a cosmic force, but in all animistic religions
the characteristicfeature is a belief in the essentialkinship or
communityof kind between the religioussubject and the reli-
gious object. Hence, we need not be surprisedto find that
in animistic religions prayer is the characteristicmode of
approachto and controlof the religiousobject. As man may
converse with, appeal to, argue with, another man, so equally
man may conversewith, appeal to, arguewith, the spirits.
By naturistic religions Durkheim understands those in
which the religiousobject (or objects) is distinctively a cosmic
and not a human force. Whateverspiritualvalues man may
find in the cosmos, however much he may seek to adjust his
life, beneficially,to it or to its multiple forces in all nature
religions,the religiousobjectlacks,as its characteristicdominat-
ing feature,the element of human kinship. Howevervaguely
felt or described,elementarynature religions, such as fetich-
ism, totemism, tree-worship, etc., embody their spiritual
valuesin an It ratherthan in a Thou. Accordingly,in primitive
nature religions,the method of control of the religiousobject
is not prayerbut magic. The religiousobject cannot properly
be appealedto; it can only be manipulated.
I wouldnext have you observethat this contrastin elemen-
tary religious types holds true throughout the entire history
of religion: it is as marked and significant today as it ever
was.
In the earliestknownformof primitivesociety-the kinship
group-we are met by spiritism and totemism at the very
threshold; the one religionbeing, as we have seen, animistic,
the other naturistic. At the close of this epoch we encounter,
on the one hand, ancestor-worshipand the tribal worship of
anthropomorphic,animistic deities; on the other hand, we
meet the worship of animals, trees, rivers, mountains, the
heavenlybodies,fire,etc., conceivedeither boldly as mysterious

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606 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

nature forces or throughsuch a thin veil of animismthat the

essentialnaturismof the worshipis clearlyperceptible.
But time passes,and here and there about the world-groups,
families, and tribes are welded together into more complex
organizations,and the nations arise with their autocraticmili-
tary and ecclesiastical leaders: kinship as the all-dominant
social band is displacedby patriotismand retiresto the lesser
realmsof control. The individualslowly emergesas a subject
of rights and duties in himself, though these rights and duties
are mere gifts and obligationsgranted to and laid on him by
sovereign authority in return for individual loyalty to the
sovereign,to the state, its commoninstitutions,andits common
laws. We designatesuch a great social changean advanceand
perhapswe are right; perhaps,as some would say, not. But,
be this as it may, the emergenceof the nations with their
centralizedauthority,their more or less unifiedinstitutionsand
laws, their intense emphasis upon individual loyalty to their
severalnationalheads-this emergence,I say, was accompanied
by a transformationof religioninto distinctlynationalformsin
whicheachformwas characterizedand stampedwith the genius
of the national life from which it sprang.
Now these new national religionsare some of them animis-
tic and some of them naturisticin type. In Greeceand Israel
the gods or god developed as great anthropomorphicdeities,
human in their entirety; among the Greeks as natural men
endowedwith powers superhuman; among the Hebrewsas a
spirit infinitelyexaltedbut with a consciousnessclosely akin to
the human. In Egypt and in India the gods are theriomor-
phic, therianthropic,or thinly veiled powers of nature-the
sky, the atmosphere,the lightning, fire, the earth, etc., in all
their exalted powerin themselvesand in their controlover the
destiniesof men.
Now, with this distinctionof animisticand naturistictypes
of religionclearly in mind, let us look a little more closely at
the developmentof the religionsof Israel and of India.

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 RELIGION AND ANTHROPOLOGY 607

I believe it is safe to say that the Hebrews and the Hindus

are the world's most typical and significant examples of charac-
teristically religious peoples. They are peoples of dominantly
religious genius, but they are oppositely religious. The
Hebrew religion is essentially humanistic; the Hindu is essen-
tially cosmic.
The God of Israel is, throughout its history, a personal god
-the epitome and ideal of culture as conceived by the Hebrews,
objectified and thrown upon the background of the world.
Hence the religion of Israel lives in the realm of human ideals,
especially the moral, and operates in terms of human relations.
Loyalty--an essentially human loyalty--whether defined as
the appeal of kin, or as feudal loyalty to an autocratic king, or
as a freeman's service to a moral creator and world-ruler, or
again, as in the religion of Jesus, the interested, loyal, and
loving participation of children in an ideal home life where God
is the Father, the social order is the home, and all mankind are
the children. In such a religion God is reduced completely
to human terms, and man becomes the measure of the cosmic.
No relation is true which is not a humanized relation. Prayer
becomes naturally the mode of contact with and participation
in the divine. Human culture in its varied forms provides the
means for defining the "sanctities" and the "divinities" of life.
Social life and service-our common, everyday living-open to
us our true religious expression and the real test of our loyalty.
Thus the animism of primitive religion, expanded to its full
limits, becomes the concrete personalism of the religion of Jesus.
On the other hand, the gods of India are cosmic in character
and, under the influence of their own internal development,
drop the alien veil of personality and expose their true character
in an impersonal monism-a true pantheism. To the Hindu,
God is the universal cosmic principle, and religion consists in
union with that principle-the realization of the divine. The
final religious equation of Indian thought is Atman-Brahman,
i.e., there is an absolute identity, in reality, between the soul of

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608 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

man and the cosmic principle. And both soul and cosmic
principle are impersonal in essence. Thus to find Atman is
to find Brahman, but to accomplish this one must slough off all
personalism and must attune one's life to the impersonal veri-
ties of things. To the writers of the Upanishads and the
Vedanta, spiritual values are fundamentally and eternally
real, but they are essentially, yet intensely, objective and
impersonal. Now, to keep in touch with the cosmic forces
upon which he felt his life to be dependent and to bind these
forces to his well-being, the Indian first employed magic-the
crude magic of the Atharva Veda. Soon this method passed
over into the world-controlling formulas of the Brahmans.
Lastly, it fashioned itself into a method of inner concentration
by which it was believed man might free himself from the illu-
sions of the human, personal viewpoint and attain truth, viz.,
participation in the all pervading but impersonal being.
Tomorrow, to judge from current movements and thoughts,
science will replace magic, ritual, and inner concentration as
the method of divine realization and, for the Hindu, religion
and science will walk hand in hand. In such a religion personal-
ism and prayer have no place; they belong to the realm of
illusions. Truth is to be found only in the non-personal, the
objective, the impersonal, the naturistic, i.e., in Brahman.
To my mind, Christianity and Vedantism, as thus roughly
outlined, furnish the types of positive religious forms upon
which the modern world must build. The one is the full
expression of a religion in which the human factor is dominant
and the cosmic is subordinate in function; the other is the full
expression of a religion in which the cosmic swallows up the
human factor and makes objective naturism supreme.
Opposed to both Christianity and Vedantism stands
Buddhism. It may perhaps be described as a negative religion.
It denies human values and is agnostic toward ultimate prin-
ciples. Yet it is more than a morality; it is a veritable
religion-a religion in which both human and cosmic factors

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 RELIGION AND ANTHROPOLOGY 609

are written in negative terms. One might speak of it as a

negative Christianity or as a critical Vedantism. Beyond
these three there is no other universal religion of pure and
distinct type. Mohammedanism, the only claimant, belongs
to the animistic type and is of mongrel breed.
If, then, we may correctly say that religion is "a realization
of the sacred in life and a sense of the divine in the cosmos,"
if every religion possesses, to its own being, both human and
cosmic factors, though now the one and now the other comes
uppermost, the further and fundamental questions arise:
Whence the sacred ? Whence the divine? Do the "sancti-
ties" and "divinities" of human life spring from human soil ?
How are they related to cosmic activity ?
Durkheim's attitude toward these problems I shall endeavor
to state as directly and as briefly as possible.
To Durkheim it is incontestable that "sanctities" and
"divinities" are human products. The day of sheer super-
naturalism has gone by. If, as the facts warrant us in main-
taining, religion be indigenous to human life and to human
society, everything that is sacred and all that is divine must
also spring therefrom.
But whence the sacred ? To Durkheim, the sacred is the
vehicle, the bearer, the exponent of those human values which
are most deep-set, common, well established, significant, and
controlling in life and society. Whatever appears to be essen-
tial to man's life, whatever grips him or his society centrally
and controls his action throughout, whatever distils essentially
his permanent interests-that, whatever it may be, gathers to
itself sanctity. Thus, to primitive man, the fundamentals and
essentials of his group life and organization appear as things
sacred. Among the natives of Australia the media of their
cultus-stones, storehouses, ceremonies, totems and their repre-
sentations, rocks, rivers, hills, etc.-possess sanctity of the
most pronounced order. Indeed, among all primitive peoples,
the customs which embody group organization and control are

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6Io THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

universally held to be sacred. They are held to be sacred

because it is commonly believed that they are essential to the
life and well-being of the group and that this has been so from
the beginning. Similarly, priests, chiefs, patriarchs, kings,
institutions, forces of nature, as they have gained the attention
of men and have entered vitally into the life of mankind have
each and all taken on religious, i.e., sacred quality. To attack
a priest, to pollute a temple, to consume the flesh of a sacrifice
without warrant, mean not only to profane sanctities but also
to arouse the deepest passions of men, and for the very good
reason that such action touches fundamental beliefs of men to
the very quick. Kings are nowadays passing rapidly into the
discard for the reason that, in this democratic age, they exercise
an increasingly diminishing r6le in the social life and order to
which they belong. Yet we have all heard of "the divine
right of kings"-a doctrine once sacrosanct and, therefore,
supposedly unalterable. Kings became sacrosanct and even
divine because throughout the history of the autocratic state
they, with the high priests, also sacrosanct, were the perma-
nent and fundamental media of social organization. The caste
system of India first appears, in the history of that people, as
a rough division of labor. There were soldiers, priests, agricul-
turists or herdsmen, and, a little later, slaves, the four forming
the foundation castes of India-Kshatriya, Brahman, Vaisya,
Sudra. As time wore on, the priest class gained control of
Hindu social and political life, indeed of its entire corpus. As
this control was gained the priest grew in significance and in
sanctity until it was said of him: " There are two kinds of gods,
for the gods are gods, and priests that are learned in the Veda
are gods." The exceedingly modern Hindu religion of Sikhism
organized the lives of its devotees about the sayings of Nanak,
which were embodied in the volume known as the Granth.
Pre-eminently susceptible to religion, as Hindus are wont to
be, the Sikhs had their religious beliefs driven in on them by the
sharpest kind of persecution. As a result, the Granth ceased

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 RELIGIONAND ANTHROPOLOGY 611

to be regarded as a mere volume of religious literature. It first

passed into the realm of the sacred and is now worshiped as a
divinity.
These illustrations will be sufficient, I believe, to make clear
the convictions of Durkheim and with him, of many contempo-
rary anthropologists as to the origin and function of the sacred.
But to prevent misunderstanding one further point may be
noted. The question may be raised: Does not the sacred often
embody future ideals and not merely register past accomplish-
ments ? And I answer, "Yes, but the principle of explana-
tion remains the same." For example, looking forward, any
principle, any institution, any program that is intensely held
by individuals or by groups and that is believed by them to be
fundamentally essential to future well-being and reconstruc-
tion will gather sanctity to itself and take on distinctly reli-
gious coloring. There are individuals today who hold
intensely the conviction that the free rights of individuals
are being undermined and that the future of democracy and
a livable society is being menaced. Many such individuals,
uplifted by the thought of all that is humanly at stake, exhibit,
as they throw themselves into the fight, a truly prophetic zeal,
a holy fervor, a sacred passion. Does not the socialist, in
challenging the past and present social order, feel profoundly
that he is basing his claims and his actions upon the sacred
rights of men-his fellow-men, although his fellow-workers
first ? He may often rest his argument upon an economic
materialism, perhaps, but is not his controlling motive a con-
viction, absolute and passionate, that his cause is a sacred cause
and that upon its success the one true future depends ?
Sanctities, therefore, whether static or dynamic, are of the
essence of human life.
But what of "divinities," the companion pieces of sancti-
ties ?
"Divinities" are duplex in character, they are "cosmic,"
and they are also "humanistic."

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612 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

Few will deny that divinities are thought of as being essen-

tially cosmic in nature. They are "powers not ourselves"
that have a deep and abiding significance for men. Spirits,
fetiches, totems, gods-what are they but phases of the cosmos,
natural and human, or the total cosmos itself ? Trees,
animals, plants, heavenly bodies, mountains, rivers, the over-
arching sky, the atmospheric changes, heaven, earth, the
mysteries of life and reproduction, the sun, the moon, the
stars, the ocean, the volcano-these and many other features
of the cosmos have been and still are the materials of which
"divinities" are made. They became "divinities " not because
of themselves but because of their supposed influence in human
life. The point of this contention may, perhaps, be made clear
by a brief reference to the ancient Hindu god Indra. Indra
finds his opposite and enemy in Vritra. Vritra is the demon,
ceaselessly active, whose abiding and persistent purpose is to
impound the heavenly cows (the clouds) and thus to prevent
men (the prot6g6s of Indra) from obtaining milk (rain) for
their fields. To fight Vritra and to stave off from his people
drought, famine, pestilence, is the abiding duty of Indra, the
god of the atmosphere, lightning, thunder, and all other forms
of stormy atmospheric display. Now if we examine Indra and
Vritra a little more closely we find ourselves in the presence of
an ever recurringHindu economic problem. The fate of millions
of India's teeming population is dependent upon the coming
of the rains. With rain there is plenty and happiness; with
drought there is famine, pestilence, death. Such is the time-
old drama of India's life. Out of it, in the olden days, grew
the religion of Indra. On the one hand there were the nature
forces-drought, rain, lightning, thunder-conditioning India's
weal and woe; on the other hand was the vital ever recur-
ring need of obtaining the beneficent rain and of escaping
demonic drought. Brought together, these two factors produce
the opposite "divinities" of Indra and Vritra, and all the
"sanctities" connected with their service.

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 RELIGIONAND ANTHROPOLOGY 613

But while it is true that "divinities" are nature-forces, it is

equally certain that they are humanistic also. Animism, as
we have already seen, is the belief that nature is alive as man is
alive; between it and him there is kinship. Consequently,
primitive man's attitude toward nature-forces, as expressed
in animism, is that they behave as he does, have thoughts and
feelings as he has thoughts and feelings, and have organized
forms of activity. Thus "spirits" of every variety must
be dealt with as men deal one with another; they occupy
definite localities and these localities may be organized and
characterized after the manner of group organization. When
spirits of the family, the clan, the tribe, emerge, they not merely
exhibit in their relations among themselves the social organiza-
tion of their particular groups but they also embody the ideals
of their groups. This process is made especially clear through
the development of anthropomorphic polytheism and mono-
theism. In these forms of religion, the gods and the god are
thought of, as to their natures, behavior, and relations, after
the analogy of human nature, human life, and human social
organization. The gods are male and female; there are grand-
fathers and grandmothers among the gods, as well as fathers
and mothers, sisters and brothers; their conduct toward one
another and toward their devotees is patterned on human con-
duct and is regulated by its standards. In the higher poly-
theistic religions, and in ethical monotheism especially, the
gods or god become the vehicles of man's advancing ideals.
In the Hebrew-Christian religious development this is funda-
mentally and peculiarly true. The god of Jesus is a thoroughly
humanized god, and the religion of Jesus moves in the medium
of an idealized social order.
The gods and god-man's divinities-are, therefore, in every
form of animistic religion the projection of man's ideals out
from himself and into the cosmic order. This much we learn
from Durkheim. In her volume entitled Themis Jane Harrison
works out the interpretation in detail for the Greek god Zeus.

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614 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

So much for the animistic type of religion, but what about

the naturistic religions ?
In naturistic religions the personal element is held in abey-
ance wherever it is recognized, and the evolution of this mode
of religion has been toward the complete elimination of the
personal. The control of naturistic divinities is by impersonal
means, and the religious attitude is ever objective. None the
less the attitude of the devotees of these religions is distinctly
religious, and the "divinities" are essentially spiritual. The
difference between Christianity and Vedantism, fundamental
as it is, rests upon social conditions. Both interpret the
cosmic factor in religion in humanistic terms, but to the one the
essence of society rests in persons and in personal relations,
whereas, to the other, persons are but the vehicles and temporary
embodiments of an inherently objective and impersonal social
order. To Christianity, persons in their human relations, are
the centers of society and the agents of its progress; to Vedant-
ism persons are but torches to pass on the flame of life; society,
in its impersonal agencies and relations, is the all important
fact. Thus, whereas to Christianity persons are inherently
valuable, to Vedantism they are inherently valueless. Or to
state the contrast otherwise: to the Christian the individual,
in principle, is everthing and caste is nothing, while to the
Hindu the individual is nothing and caste is everything. In
the continuity of social institutions in India and in the extreme
conservatism of its social life we thus find the clue to its type
of spiritual life. Hindu, as well as Christian, regards God as
the ultimate cosmic fact; the two differ in the type of human-
ism which each projects into its cosmic beliefs, and this differ-
ence, in essence, is dependent upon a difference in social
situation. Should the social organizations of the world evei
take on the rigid compartmental class distinctions of India,
Vedantism would become the religion of the world; the fate of
Christianity, on the other hand, is bound up with the success
of militant, creative democracy. However, there is a further

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 RELIGIONAND ANTHROPOLOGY 615

possibility: should Vedantism and Christianity both fail

through the breakdown of both personal and caste values, and
should the life of man appear to be, both individually and
socially, an essentially worthless thing-mere flotsam and
jetsam on the cosmic tides-man's religion would inevitably
conform to the type of the religion of Buddha. Of this possi-
bility we possess an excellent illustration and suggestion in
Bertrand Russell's The Free Man's Worship.
To results such as these, it seems to me, the researches of
anthropology directly lead, and they open up to view certain
well-defined and ever recurring metaphysical problems which
in closing we shall merely indicate. And after all, these prob-
lems reduce themselves to one, viz., "What right, as intelligent
men, have we to contend that the cosmos may properly be
interpreted in humanistic terms, that it possesses in its essential
being specifically human characteristics? Unless that ques-
tion can be answered positively, then religion fails in its objec-
tive, cosmic reference. However, in being forced to face this
ultimate metaphysical inquiry, religion finds itself in very
respectable company-that of science. While in no wise deny-
ing the objectivity of science or the independent reality of
the scientist's cosmos, one may insist that, after all, science is
an ordered humanistic attack upon our vast cosmos. As a
process science is an endeavor to read the heiroglyphics of
nature, a process to which the clue is and the resultant inter-
pretation may be essentially humanistic. In a word religion
and science, equally, rest upon humanistic first principles in
their objective cosmic references. But this is to say that
religion and science are not in essence antagonistic: rather
they stand or fall together, ultimately.

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